I spent this week putting information into the newly updated database. It works much faster than it did before, and is very intuitive to use. Dan mentioned that he would like to see some screenshots, so please enjoy the following images:

Here we see the front page of the database, with two text boxes, one for the Source and one for the Reference.

Options will pop up after you begin typing which makes adding sources and references super quick.

I spent this week putting information into the newly updated database. It works much faster than it did before, and is very intuitive to use. Dan mentioned that he would like to see some screenshots, so please enjoy the following images:

Here we see the front page of the database, with two text boxes, one for the Source and one for the Reference.

Options will pop up after you begin typing which makes adding sources and references super quick.

Just thought I would post a short update for you, as I was meant to have started reading and collecting data by this point. Unfortunately my efforts have been sabotaged by the library’s book scanner which has been refusing to work properly for me.

At the beginning of the week it worked beautifully for two batches of scanning, however on the third batch it kept kicking me out and deleting my work, saying that it did not have enough memory. The library staff was quick to look at it, but as the “book scanner expert” was not available that day, I had to wait for it to be fixed.

I busied myself with other work (it turns out that I was not quite finished collecting sources, there was a sizeable chunk that had escaped my notice!), and came back this morning with even more books to scan, but a new issue has arisen:

I finally get to start reading this week!!! While I am still not 100% complete in my sourcing of all the books and articles, it is looking as though I will definitely be able to start reading by Wednesday if not earlier.

I also have a bunch of books from inter-library loans that I need to scan portions of. That will be part of my job today.

The database will be ready this week as well. Garret says that there will be a few improvements that he will want to make, but I will be able to start using it this week. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick blog post this morning to give you an update of what’s to come this week:

I am continuing to gather all of the articles/books needed for the project, and hope to complete the search this week. There may be a few inter-library loans that we will be waiting on, but I would like everything else to be ready to go!

Not all the articles will be accessible on GLOBUS right away, as the transfers do not work on the university network and I am currently living without internet at my apartment (The horror! The horror!). I will be transferring them when I can, as free wi-fi will allow. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi all!
You might have noticed that I forgot to blog last week… This is true and totally my fault. I moved into a new apartment and in the process may have suffered a mild concussion. Oops! I have been keeping up with my work, however because I was working at random times of the day and night in chunks of a few hours each I definitely forgot to blog! So here is my update from the last two weeks:

Unfortunately I don’t have much news to report. I have been going through our Zotero bibliography and collecting missing articles through online databases and inter-library loans. It is going well, but it is taking a bit of time.GLOBUS is now working for me thanks to Gurpreet’s help figuring out what was going on. Read the rest of this entry »

This blog comes to you a day later than usual, as Friday’s work ended up taking a lot longer than I thought and I ran out of time! To be honest, this week was spent much like last week: checking our Zotero bibliography against other bibliographies of Cædmon scholarship.

I ended up re-doing a bit of my work from last week, as I learned in my meeting with Dan on Monday that our scope was a bit wider than I had previously thought. I was worried that I had not been considering certain entries in the various bibliographies to be “about Cædmon enough”, so I decided to go through the entries again and add some that I may have missed. It makes sense to add more rather than less, as I can simply remove an article from the list if I read it and realise it has nothing to do with Cædmon. At the moment our bibliography is almost complete, and we have nearly 700 entries!

A student in my Old English class asked a good question today in her class blog:

I’m confused. The point of this class is to be able to read Old English. Does this mean we are supposed to be building a lexicon that would eventually become so engrained in us that the words don’t require as much of a “translation” as an innate understanding of the meaning of the text? This seems rather frightening. When I hear the words “nominative accusative singular” sweep one after the other my head begins to spin. I have to look at the dictionary three times in three minutes to remember what one word means.

I think what process seems natural to me would be to translate a sentence, and after knowing what the words are in modern English, to determine what words are nominative, objects, etc. in the translated sentence. Read the rest of this entry »

About Daniel Paul O’Donnell

I am a Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, where I teach and conduct research in the Digital Humanities, Digital Cultural Heritage, English Philology, and Book History. You can read more about me by following this link.

My university site (which contains syllabi and the like) can be found by following this link. Most of the non-course related material from that site can be found here.